NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti On Linux: Best Linux Gaming Performance

For this testing I was using the latest publicly available driver, NVIDIA 378.13, and it's worked out fine with the GTX 1080 Ti testing this morning. The only caveat is the graphics card is simply identified as a NVIDIA "Graphics Device" until the next driver update to officially add support for the GTX 1080 Ti. NVIDIA will likely be issuing that point release update shortly.

The NVIDIA 378.13 driver has been stable with all OpenGL and Vulkan workloads thrown at it thus far. As mentioned earlier, OpenCL and CUDA Linux tests are coming up in the next day or two.

For this graphics card the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver is really the only option. With the current Nouveau open-source driver for Pascal you will only get mode-setting support. The hardware acceleration for Pascal will land with the Linux 4.12 kernel when it officially premieres a few months down the road and requires recently-published firmware images. But even when that code rolls out as stable, there isn't yet any re-clocking support or other features to allow the GTX 1080 Ti to actually perform nicely with this open driver code. For now, only the Kepler generation and older remain in good shape with this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver.

The NVIDIA cards tested for the GTX 1080 Ti comparison with the 378.13 driver included the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. For Radeon coverage I tested my high-end/modern available AMD GPUs and that included the Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury with the Linux 4.11-rc1 AMDGPU DRM code and Mesa 17.1-dev Git RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

All of these OpenGL and Vulkan Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Performance-per-Watt measurements were also done via the Phoronix Test Suite by reading the AC power consumption as measured by a WattsUp Pro USB power meter.